Fish Filet. « The Edge of the American West: [S]ince [Stanley] Fish has yet another poorly-argued barrel of drivel up today, timely, too!
The shortest way to express my annoyance with Fish is to say simply that he doesn’t answer Jesse’s fundamental question: what’s the academy like? He has a rare opportunity and platform to explain the academy to laypeople, and he does it poorly.... [M]y annoyance with Fish is that nothing he writes would allow her to understand the academy.... Academic freedom is simply the claim that legitimate evaluation of a research program should be done not by external political or administrative forces, but by peers.... This sort of thing gives Fish conniption fits as he cherry-picks the NYT comments. “It would be hard to imagine another field of endeavor in which employees believe that being attentive to their employer’s goals and wishes is tantamount to a moral crime,” he says.... [T]his is easy to answer. The employer of a CPA may be a company like Enron.... [W]e, on the outside, think it wise when the professional rejects the bidding of those who pay the bills in favor of the standards internal to her profession... we think that being attentive to their employers’ goals and wishes at the expense of their integrity oughta be-a crime.... [A]cademic freedom is that it is traditionally construed to protect also speech not directly related to one’s work... it protects Fish’s job from his drivel in the NYT, and it protects eric’s blogging about the New Deal. The way I look at it is that Fish is the price we have to pay for eric.
So, how is academic freedom protected? Tenure is simply the hiring contract that gives the commitment to academic freedom some heft.... I think it would be helpful if the public perception of tenure reflected reality, which is that essentially, it’s a system in which one of the potential outcomes of one of your annual reviews is losing your job, and this can happen in cases where a person has been at a university for eight or nine years, has glowing student evaluations, a great number of books and articles, a reputation as an insightful and gregarious colleague and scholar. Fish has an opportunity to do this. He doesn’t....
But what really bothers me about Fish is the conflation of both academic freedom and tenure with a relaxed institutional culture. Hence all of the cheap shots about academic schedules (they wander in at ten! they wear jeans! they have weird personalities and unstylish hair!), none of which has anything to do with academic freedom and probably wouldn’t be defended on those grounds. But it’s consistently pointed to as a reason that academics don’t live in the real world, and that nowhere else would personal idiosyncrasies be tolerated. Both of those claims are false. The latter is true in all jobs where the institutional culture is such that personal idiosyncrasies don’t matter much to the performance of the job. The common mistake is to compare the academy only to high-level corporate jobs with rigid institutional cultures.
As to the former, it makes the mistake common to five-year-olds who think that Teacher lives at the school, never eats, and never goes potty. I know tenured faculty who wander in at 10, who, if you submit to them at 1am a feverishly written draft of a chapter will have to you 20 single-spaced pages of comments by 4:30am.
Note, if we’re interested in critiquing the system, distinguishing the questions is helpful. Can we have academic freedom without tenure? I don’t know; give me an alternative! Let’s see if we think it would work! Can we have academic freedom with a rigid institutional culture? I don’t know, let’s think about it! Perhaps there is a correlation between the state of one’s beard and the state of one’s mind. Does being a professor with academic freedom mean that one should sound off on things outside one’s expertise in the public sphere? Hmm, what a good question!
That’s not what Fish is doing. That’s what doth irk.
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